


This One’s for The Torn Down (the experts at the fall)

by anythingcanhappenchild



Series: Comes and Goes [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (all not explicit), (not explicit) - Freeform, Abuse, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Child Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Daisy is awesome, Discussion of Victim Blaming, F/M, Found Families, From Daisy's Perspective, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Internal Victim Blaming, Loss of Faith, POV Second Person, Regaining that Faith, Religion, Self-Hatred, Social Justice, bisexual Daisy, domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 13:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14379279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingcanhappenchild/pseuds/anythingcanhappenchild
Summary: He also doesn’t know that you learned to win fights in ways he’d never think of.-You learned to fight without ever letting the others know you were in the ring.He doesn’t understand how leaving gives you an opportunity to fight, to fix things, because you knew, even then, that the only person who would fix things for you was you.(Later you’ll decide the only person who plans to fix anything, anything important, is you, and you’ll hack your way into social justice before you’re old enough to vote.)So, he leaves, and tells you to think of what you’d like for dinner.He leaves, and you run before they even turn the corner.(He shouldn’t have been surprised.)ORSkye starts as Mary and then she's Daisy, and learns the meaning of trauma and faith along the way.





	This One’s for The Torn Down (the experts at the fall)

**Author's Note:**

> My first fanfic!
> 
> Title from: Greg Laswell - Comes and Goes
> 
> Please review the tags, I've included warnings. Let me know if I need to add anything.

You’re eight that summer.

Except really, you’re nine, but you don’t know that yet, won’t know it for almost twenty years, and it’s only a year, so, really, it shouldn’t matter at all. 

(It does though, when you’re all grown up, that year seems to matter so much.)

But you think you’re eight and your name is still Mary Sue, and you’re going away this summer. The nuns send away as many kids as they can during the summer, so that fewer people need to work, since no one can go to camp, and no one’s going to school, they’d need a lot more people to work, and they can’t afford that, can’t afford that any more than they can afford clothes and toys that aren’t second-hand, any more than they can afford clothes and toys at all.

So, you’re going away this summer, and you’re excited, because, while everyone knows summer placements are temporary, they’ve always been your longest, and you can’t wait. You think one day, you might get lucky, that maybe you won’t be a good fit for any normal long-term forever-homes, but maybe you can be a good fit for this temporary, different sort of home. 

After all, you’ve always been nothing but different.

*

You make yourself a nuisance, in the weeks leading up to summer, and the sisters start to threaten you with the ruler so you’ll stop bothering them with questions about your summer home.

(It takes you a long time to realize they shouldn’t have done that.)

They threaten to keep you at St. Agnes when the ruler doesn’t deter you as long as it usually would.

Finally, Sister Mason tells you, that if you’re so intent on having a summer home, maybe you should pray to God about it. She tells you to pray for a happy home during your night time prayers, that maybe you’ll be able to stay still long enough if you’re praying for something like that.

(Something selfish like that, she doesn’t need to say, since the Priest talks about greed that sermon, and you don’t pretend to think it’s not about you.)

You tell them you’d sit still for the sermons and all the praying if only they’d let you sit instead of kneel.

The nuns tell you that God knows who’s holy by who kneels, and so you just need to learn how to be a good little girl.

*

The Andersons are an older couple. The man is heavy around the middle, and seems to waddle more than he walks, but his cheeks are rosy, and his eyes seem to sparkle, and maybe you’ve been reading too many storybooks, but he seems like the sort of man who gives away cookies and tells bedtime tales.

(Pretty soon, you’ll hate bedtime tales.)

The woman is a lot thinner, but she looks more like she was made that way, than like she makes herself be that way.

(You don’t know when you learned the difference, but it was probably around the Rebecca and Miley stopped eating dinner, and started spending after-meal-times in the bathrooms. 

It’s not really in the way they started looking like their bodies were caving in – you see that sometimes in other kids too, the kids who hold on to their plates like someone’s going to take it away, and snap like stray dogs when anyone gets too close – it’s more of the look in their eyes when they look at food, or talk about food, or think about food, and Mrs. Anderson seems just fine with the cookies she’s putting in the oven.)

Still, you check her face and arms carefully, just like the older girls taught you to, because people don’t always look the way they are, sometimes Devils look like Angels, and that is always the important ones to us, the one that gets us in trouble, but you also know that sometimes Angels look like Devils, and they’re always a lot harder to spot, and sometimes you can learn just what types of house you’ll be living in by the woman’s arms.

(You’re checking for bruises, but you say you like her shirt when she asks what you’re looking for.)

*

Everything seems so perfect for the first three weeks.

(You understand, after this home, that there are two kinds of bad home.

The first kind is when you take two steps in the front door, and have to lock your knees to keep from running out, because you know, know in your gut and your bones, that you need to get out. You think your social workers must be blind, or stupid, not to feel their hair standing on end when they walk into that sort of home.

The second kind is the ones like the Andersons, where everything seems good and perfect and you relax and act good and act perfect and hope, only in your mind, and very quietly in your mind because hoping and then losing hurts so much more than never hoping, that you’ll get to stay, but then something goes very wrong, and you realize this is the sort of house you needed to run from.

You think the second type is so much worse.)

But everything seemed so perfect, until one night Mr. Anderson doesn’t leave your room after you finish your bedtime story.

He doesn’t leave, and he asks if you’d like to play a game. A big kid game, that he thinks you’ll be good at because you’re so mature, and so good all the time.

You’re tired, but you want to stay, and you want to be good (no one really calls you good except him), so you tell him you’d love to play.

He smiles and you’ll think back at this moment later and wonder when his twinkling eyes turned sharp, and much much later you’ll realize they hadn’t.

You’ll realize that Mr. Anderson pulls you out from under your covers and pushes on your shoulder until you’re kneeling down in front of him with a twinkle in his eye. You’ll realize that he had the same sparkle when he put on Disney movies for you to watch and when he snuck you an extra cookie after dinner with a grin and a don’t-tell-Molly and when he pushes on your shoulder until you’re kneeling down in front of him. 

It takes you a while to understand why that scares you more. You think it has to do with wolves in sheep’s clothing, and knowing who’s just sheep. Later you think it’s because no one is ever just a sheep.

Right now, you aren’t thinking of much at all.

(You kneel and wonder if God still sees you, wonder if he still thinks you’re holy, because all you feel is dirty.)

(He tells you you’re a good girl, and you decide you never want to be good again.)

*

You think God is really a genie. The sort that grants you wishes, but never really gives you what you wanted, what you meant.

You think He’s a genie because he gave you a happy home, for three whole weeks. And then it became the sort of Hell that makes you wonder what sin you dared to commit.

* 

They leave you alone one day. They tell you they won’t be gone long, and you’ll be okay all by yourself because you’re so good and mature, but if you need anything, anything at all, you can ask the neighbor, the one down the hall, do you remember her?

They leave you alone one day, and you don’t think he expects you to run.

(You still aren’t sure if she knows about what he does. Some days when you’re feeling generous you believe she couldn’t know, that surely, he must have hidden it so very well. Other days, when you’re feeling cynical and angry, you’re so sure she knew, knew and did nothing, that you hate her almost more than you hate him.)

But he leaves one day, and doesn’t expect you to leave because you’re very far from St. Agnes, and you’re only eight, and how could you look at him leaving as an opportunity to fight.

He doesn’t expect you to leave, because you’re always so good, you don’t ever fight, but he doesn’t know that you don’t kick and scream because you know you’ll lose. 

(You’d like to think you’re saving your energy, escaping away from the world, but really, you’re too scared to find out what happens when you lose.)

But he also doesn’t know that you learned to win fights in ways he’d never think of. That you avoided playground bullies by staring at them stone faced anytime they came close, until they were so bored with you they stopped coming to bother you. That you win against the nuns by never quite breaking the rules, and never being around when they learned how far you bent them. That you learned how teachers and nuns with so many kids to look after don’t remember your trouble making so long as you stay out of range until another kid kicks up a fuss.

You learned to fight without ever letting the others know you were in the ring.

He doesn’t understand how leaving gives you an opportunity to fight, to fix things, because you knew, even then, that the only person who would fix things for you was you.

(Later you’ll decide the only person who plans to fix anything, anything important, is you, and you’ll hack your way into social justice before you’re old enough to vote.)

So, he leaves, and tells you to think of what you’d like for dinner.

He leaves, and you run before they even turn the corner.

(He shouldn’t have been surprised.)

*

It takes you almost a week to get back to St. Agnes.

You got lost a few times, and it really was farther away then you thought. You didn’t realize at the time, but you were very lucky it was summer time. (You only realize that six years later when you run away in the middle of winter, and almost went back to the orphanage, to the really horrible home you finally had to escape from, just to get warm again, for longer than the shelters or any of the stores you’d pretend to be a customer in would let you stay.)

(Later than that, you also learn just what could have happened to a little lost eight-year-old, who asked directions back to the orphanage far too often for no one bad to never hear.)

*

It’s only been a week since you’ve been back, and you keep waking the other girls up with your nightmares.

(You learned to be quiet years ago, but you guess you’ll have to relearn every time something bad happens, and it’s taking a lot longer this time than you think it should.)

It’s only been a week and you’re the only one standing in a sea of kneeling children. You’re standing during sermon, and Sister Jones is hissing about showing you’re holy and get on your knees child, and you’re sneering ¬– I don’t want to be holy for a God who wants children on their knees – and the other children are staring at you with a confusing mix of just stop making trouble, and you’re so amazing, she’s standing up to the nuns, and we just want to get this over with, so you’re staring at them and saying the Devil wants you on your knees too, are you sure your worshiping the right man.

You’re not standing anymore because Sister Jones just boxed your ears hard enough to send you to the ground, the other kids are still staring, but you’re standing up again because, like Hell are you letting anyone push you down again, but then Sister Jones is pushing on your shoulder and telling the Priest to just lead the prayer, I’ll make sure she doesn’t cause trouble, and she’s pushing on your shoulder, and suddenly you’re screaming and kicking and flailing like you haven’t since you were tiny, too young to remember exactly when the last tantrum you threw ended.

(You aren’t sure exactly how it ends, since you aren’t seeing the nuns and St. Agnes as much as you’re seeing Mr. Anderson and their little apartment in the middle of the block.)

*

Sister McKenna sits with you later that night, after you’ve stopped screaming and crying, and she sends a sneering nun out of the vicinity, you can still hear her though, talking about the Devil possessing you, and how you always made it so easy to let him in.

(You always rolled your eyes when they talked like that before, but right now you’re not so sure the Devil is every really going to leave, leave your thoughts and dreams alone, leave so you stop jumping when the nuns walk past your bedroom door and stop scraping your nails down your arms thinking just get it off, please just get it all off.)

She asks you if everything is okay, if anything bad happened at your last home, with the Andersons, if you ran away because something happened.

You figure you must look pretty pathetic, with the dried tears and mucus covering your face and your red rimmed eyes that still feel swollen. But no matter how you look you’ve never been stupid, no matter what anyone says you know you aren’t stupid, you might not be the right kind of smart, the good kind of smart, but you’re still smart. And you stare at her with pursed lips and wait for her to give up and leave.

(She already knows the answer, you figure all the older girls already know the answer too. You wonder if they’ll lay off on mocking you, or if they’ll just add this new knowledge to their repertoire.)

But even if she knows, you aren’t going to say anything. It only took you half a day of listening to stories and watching the nuns to know the only thing they’d do, really do, instead of just following legal guidelines written by someone who’s never been in an orphanage, never lived or worked there, or even set one foot inside one, is drag you to the confessional and tell you to confess your sin, to make yourself clean again.

(You still might have told her, but you aren’t sure anything will ever make you clean again. And you’d prefer no one knows exactly how dirty you are.) 

She waits for a while, but gets up to leave pretty soon. She’s got a dozen other kids to care for after all, and they’re still working on summer staff.

You tell her there’s nothing holy about kneeling. You tell her you think the Devil put that in to trick people, to make them vulnerable to sin. She just stands in the doorway, looking angrier then you’ve ever seen her, but, for the first time, you don’t think that anger is directed at you.

Eventually she tells you about how kneeling is to humble yourself, to show your devotion to God. 

(It’s a canned line, the sort of thing the nuns say when they don’t really have an answer.)

You tell her if God really wants you to kneel, then you don’t want to be devoted to him at all.

You ask her what kind of Father would want his children to kneel. You ask her what kind of God she’s telling you to worship.

She’s looking at you again. She’s looking at you the way she looked at Tommy who came back from a home two months ago with a handprint wrapped around his arm, and the kind of temper that made the other Sisters hiss about demons. She’s looking at you the way she looked at Miley, who came back a whole two years ago, and still starts to cry sometimes, just out of the blue, and who visits the bathroom after mealtimes, after every mealtime. She’s looking at you like you looked at that stray dog all the kids would chase and try to kick.

(You decide you hate that look. Hate it more than Mr. Anderson’s twinkle.)

She’s shaking her head and starts to feed you another pre-approved platitude, the kind that should mean so much, but means nothing at all for you.

But she stops. She cuts herself off in the middle of a word and tells you she wished you’d been old and fat like her before you asked that question. Wished you’d asked that because you were looking at little boys and girls who didn’t have the gall to pull off any real sin, but who faced the worst of it anyway. She said she wished a lot of things.

She also tells you a secret. She tells you what answer she found, when she realized she could see the depths of Hell in the words of a man who thought children were nothing more than plaything, and the reach of the Devil in the scared eyes of a little girl who wanted a home. She tells you why she still looks to God for guidance, her God, not anyone else’s.

She tells you God is love.

*

You run away when you’re fourteen. Really fourteen, you’ll realize later, since it was one of those times that your real age and what you thought were your age were really the same.

You run away from a home that was worse than the Andersons. Except not. Because you’re fourteen, and you know all the ways to keep a bad home from becoming the worst home. Except it was because when it happened you were half there and half kneeling in front of the Andersons, hearing you’re such a good girl. Except it wasn’t. Because you knew how to hack, and you spent your first stable month after running away making sure they could never get a kid again. Except it was. Because you’re so very tired.

*

You rename yourself about three months after living on the streets.

You rename yourself because Mary Sue is the name of a little girl who wakes up crying in wet sheets and scared to death of monster she hadn’t seen for years. Mary Sue is the name of little orphan with nothing going for her, and everything going against her, and the worst sort of luck in the world.

So, you name yourself Skye. 

And you promise yourself that you’ll never let people see when everything’s falling apart. Mary let people know anytime something went wrong, but Skye, she’ll keep a smile on her face and make sure no ever knows just how much she’s falling apart.

(You don’t try to pretend nothing will fall apart, you know it will.)

(You also don’t try and pretend you won’t put yourself back together, you know you will.) 

*

You’re seventeen (eighteen), when your girlfriend twists your arm so hard it breaks.

She shows up at the hospital with a bouquet of roses, and the nurse glares at her as he moves to get your release papers.

She waits for the nurse to leave and tells you how sorry she is, how she’ll never hurt you again, how she got so mad, how you made her so mad, but she promises never to let something like this happen again. She tells you she loves you, and begs you to stay.

(That’s the first time she said she loves you, and you’ll vomit later, once you realize that.)

You promise not to leave. You don’t think she’ll go until you promise.

She smiles like this is your first date, and she just handed you a rose and promised everything will be so much fun. She smiles like she hadn’t twisted your arm until you were begging her to stop only two hours before.

(She ordered dinner for you that night. When you’re older you realize you should have seen what was coming next.) 

She smiles and tells you she’ll go buy some food, since discharge papers take forever to finish. She smiles and leaves you alone.

You leave before she gets to the cafeteria.

(She shouldn’t have been surprised.)

*

You’re on your way to Austin, because that’s as far away as you can get with the money you had on you.

You’ve left everything else behind. 

(You start to wonder if foster kids ever really stop moving.)

It’s a few hours later when you realize what she said. She said she loves you. Loves you, present tense like breaking your arm didn’t change any of that.

It’s a few hours after that, when you start to wonder what the Devil needs to do. If God is what makes people act like that.

*

If there’s one thing you can say about the Rising Tide, about Miles, it’s that they really know how to hack.

You’re leading a hack on a multinational sex trafficking ring, coordinating the different groups that decided to participate (there’s a lot, there’s always a lot when kids are involved).

You’ll be attacking the servers simultaneously, releasing the information onto several popular social media and news sites, and contacting a myriad of government groups all within the next few hours.

(You had to convince the others to contact the government. You all share the same distrust, but you know shutting down the sites wouldn’t do anything if the people aren’t arrested as well. You won them over by promising to blackmail the officials, if they tried to cover up the scandal.) 

For the first time, you’re fixing something bigger than keeping kids out of one bad home, of doxing the Priests with the wrong sort of interest in little boys, or revealing the fraud in the charities who make claims of morality.

*

You ran last night, slept on the streets for the first time in a while, all because Miles said he loved you.

You’ve finally talked yourself into going back, and you’re pretty sure it’s obvious you’ve been crying. You wonder, as you’re knocking on his door, just how much you’re going to have to tell him. You know he’s going to yell, and you know you deserve it, but if he demands an explanation, you’re not quite sure you’ll be able to give one. Not sure you can force the words you never said, not out loud and almost never in your head, out. Not sure that, even if you could, they’d make any sense, or make any difference.

He opens the door, and looks torn between crying and screaming when he sees you standing there.

You open your mouth to apologize, to form some sort of explanation about things you can’t order your thoughts around, but you only get the first few words out, before he gives a strange sort of gasping sob, and says you don’t need to tell him anything.

He half pulls you inside the apartment, and tells you that you don’t need to say anything, but please, please, the next time you need to run, just tell him you’re okay, that you aren’t lying dead somewhere because of his complete inability to read you, and for the love of God, next time, just ask him to leave if you’re planning to sleep on the streets, he’s perfectly fine crashing with a friend.

You start crying somewhere in the middle of his speech.

(He doesn’t ask you to explain that either.)

*

You join SHIELD because you want to know who your parents are, who you are. You want to know why they left you at St. Agnes, and you want to know if they loved you anyway, because you know the way bad situations can creep up on you and how a kid can make those bad things even worse.

Ten years ago – five years ago – you might not have understood, you might have raged about being unwanted and unloved, because even now you still don’t always know what those things look like.

(You think that’s why it took you so long to see it in Coulson. Why it took you longer to see it in May.

To be fair though – they don’t really love normally either.)

But now, now you know, you understand the decision people face when they’re not sure they’ll be eating tomorrow, much less in a month, and the sort of we’ll-say-this-is-freedom-but-really-it’s-just-terrifying persona you adopt when you’re living on the street, or in a van, or two weeks from eviction, and you-only-need-a-little-longer-to-make-the-money, but all you get back is –does-this-look-like-a-charity-to-you?

You understand that. And you understand the way people, the way you, can look at two pink bars and think I can’t do this, I can’t force a child into this.

(You think your parents may have left you there because of this. A lot of kids’ parents did that, at one point you might have done that.

But you made a different decision.)

You joined SHIELD to find your parents, and you nearly messed it up, messed everything up, but then Coulson gave you tracking bracelet, and a promise, and a second chance, and you almost never got those, got anything like those.

Coulson gave you a second chance, but it isn’t until later that you learn just what that second chance was for.

(You joined SHIELD to find your parents, and instead you found a family.)

*

Ward tells you his feelings are real, and you think you might throw up pretty soon.

Ward tells you his feelings are real, and all you can think is that you played your hand too soon, and need to figure out how to fix this, how to fix all of this.

Ward tells you his feeling are real, and suddenly you understand he doesn’t really love you.

Anderson didn’t love you. Your girlfriend didn’t love you. Ward doesn’t love you.

None of that was love. It was obsession and control and the sort of things a little girl feels about her doll, the one she takes out and dresses when she pleases and then forgets about and kicks under the bed for months on end.

None of that was love.

*

It’s some time later, and you’ve finally met you parents. You’ve met your parents and they’re both half insane, in different enough ways that you didn’t see it at first in Jiayang and it was all you could see at first in Cal.

You’ve met your parents and you know what they named you, you know your real age and your real birthday, and you know your legacy.

You’re angry at first. You’re angry for weeks, because you finally met your parents and now your mother is dead and your father doesn’t know he’s your father, doesn’t know he’s a father at all. So, you’re angry, and you’re still Skye.

*

You stop being angry eventually.

You stop being angry when you realize that you still finally met your parents. It ended in disaster, but you met them.

You stop being angry, and you rename yourself Daisy. You name yourself Daisy to honor Cal and Jiayang, because they gave you a legacy, and even if you’re going to change it, take out all the bad parts and make it better, you owe that to them.

(Later on, after you started being sad, and then stopped being sad, and still some time after that, you realize you also love them for that.)

So, you name yourself Daisy, and this time, you promise to do more than put yourself back together, you promise to keep yourself from falling apart.

*

Mack tells Elena that he relies on his faith, too. Too because you picked up what was supposed to be a criminal and was really a woman who took what could have been the worst thing that ever happened to her as a gift from God, who took what could have been the worst thing that happened to her and made it good, fought back against people who bully everyone around them, fought back against thugs, thugs with guns, because she took this power as a sign to help herself, as a sign that God helps those who help themselves, and you never understood what that meant until now.

You thought that’s what people said to discount your efforts, to take everything you fought tooth and nail for, and turn it into divine intervention, to punish those who can’t get up off their knees the Devil forced themselves onto, because why would God, or anyone, help you if you don’t yourself first.

But this is something different.

This is Elena taking a could-have-been-curse, taking what she could see as the Devil’s work, and turning it into God’s gift. 

He knew she’d help herself, so he helped her.

(You wonder if he knew you’d run that day, if only they’d both leave at the same time.)

Mack is a man who’s genuinely good. He looks at aliens and all the hurt they caused him, and he turned it into suspicion. But when you thought he’d look at you the same way, he showed you that kindness (that love – you still can’t see it all the time) and caution aren’t mutually exclusive.

It isn’t long before Mack loves Elena too.

(You aren’t surprised, he might always be suspicious, cautious against everything that could go wrong, but who couldn’t love the girl who decided to dump the guns in a river, and not use them, not even against the men who’d turn them against her in a second.) 

Mack loves Elena, and Mack loves you too, and it’s the sort of love you’ve been looking for since you learned the sugary sweet nuns who pushed you away anytime they were busy or unhappy, and the cold my-feelings-were-real were never love.

You think you’ve had this love before (you just can’t recognize it all the time), when Coulson brings you secret sandwiches and May stands between you and an Asgardian God and Sister McKenna looks so very angry, and it wasn’t directed at you.

Mack and Elena rely on their faith, and they love people the way you’ve always wanted to be loved, and you think you finally understand Sister McKenna.

You think you finally understand what she meant. You understand what love is. 

You understand what God is.

**Author's Note:**

> All comments welcome (from smiley faces to constructive criticism!).


End file.
